Articles & Videos

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2015

    Intranet teams continue to grow, streamline processes, and produce innovative designs. Some feature trends include: responsive design, search filters, flat design, and megamenus.

  • Top 3 IA Questions about Navigation Menus

    The number and order of navigation categories, and use of hover menus for touchscreens are frequently asked questions that arise when organizing information on a website or application.

  • Salary Trends for UX Professionals

    Over the last several years, entry-level UX salaries have dropped, while pay for experienced user experience staff has been more stable. (Updated to 2019.)

  • FAQs Still Deliver Great Value

    A usable website FAQ can improve products, services, information, and user experience as part of your knowledge management process.

  • A Link is a Promise

    The words in a link label make a strong suggestion about the page that is being linked to. The destination page should fulfill what the anchor text promises.

  • Redesigning Your Website? Don’t Ditch Your Old Design So Soon

    Testing your site’s existing design along with a few competitor websites provides valuable insight for new designs. Competitive studies help you avoid developing unusable new features.

  • Segment Analytics Data Using Personas

    Persona-inspired segments can be used in website analytics to uncover trends in data and derive UX insights. Better than (a) lumping everybody together or (b) segmenting on demographics that don't relate to user behavior.

  • The 'Liking' Principle in User Interface Design

    People prefer to say “yes” to individuals and organizations they know and like. Same goes for websites and other user interfaces.

  • User Involvement for User Adoption: An Intranet Strategy

    Involving employees early and often in intranet design projects can not only improve usability, but also encourage user adoption.

  • Use Specialized Language for Specialized Audiences

    B2B sites and other sites with specialized content that target professionals or enthusiasts should use their audiences’ jargon to communicate more precisely and professionally.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

    Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.

  • Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

    Empathy maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.

  • Journey Mapping 101

    A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

  • How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

    Step-by-step instructions to review your product to find potential usability and experience problems. Download a free heuristic evaluation template.

  • When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

    Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.

  • Service Blueprints: Definition

    Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience.

  • Design Thinking 101

    Design thinking is a user-centered process that helps teams understand needs, generate ideas, test solutions, and drive innovation.

  • Usability (User) Testing 101

    UX researchers use this popular observational methodology to uncover problems and opportunities in designs.

  • User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them

    User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.

  • Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

    Usability makes designs easy, efficient, and satisfying to use. Improve it through early, repeated user testing with real users

  • User Journeys vs. User Flows

    User journeys and user flows both describe processes users go through in order to accomplish their goals, but they differ in scope, purpose, and format.

  • Affinity Diagramming for Collaboratively Sorting UX Findings and Design Ideas

    Use affinity diagramming to cluster and organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.

  • UX Research Cheat Sheet

    User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

  • Using “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems

    Constructing how-might-we questions generates creative solutions while keeping teams focused on the right problems to solve.

  • Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

    iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.

  • User-Interface Elements: Glossary

    Use this glossary to quickly clarify definitions for key graphical user-interface elements and controls.

  • Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

    Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

  • Card Sorting: Uncover Users' Mental Models for Better Information Architecture

    In a card-sorting study, users organize topics into groups. Use this research method to create an information architecture that suits your users' expectations.

  • Open-Ended vs. Closed Questions in User Research

    Open-ended questions result in deeper insights. Closed questions provide clarification and detail, but no unexpected insights.

  • The Definition of User Experience (UX)

    "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.